Websites are the backbone of businesses and brands, especially in this day and age, where there are 3.58 billion (according to Statista) internet users worldwide. Therefore, The need for a well-designed website keeps getting more and more important.

Unfortunately, not every website is designed perfectly.

Why?

There are many mistakes that web designers can make during the design process.

However, there are some ‘more common’ mistakes that keep creeping up & most certainly can be avoided.

We have compiled a list of the most common website mistakes that have been made this year:

Exclusion or Misuse of SEO techniques

Websites are designed and created for the traffic that you want to send to them. However, for your website to get this traffic, it needs to be seen by online users.

This is where SEO efforts come in, and why they are so important. If they are not done correctly and best practices are not followed, it doesn’t matter how elegant, simple and amazing your website is, it just won’t be seen.

Unfortunately, many web designers are focusing too much on the look and enticement of the website, that they forget the small, simple SEO efforts that are imperative to the website being seen by users that are surfing the web.

The Use of Low-Quality & Stock Images

What’s worse than going online and looking at images where you can see every single pixel in the picture like it’s a grain of sand? That’s right, not much.

So, you need to ask yourself; if you don’t enjoy it, why would others?

The use of stock and low-resolution images is not recommended when designing websites. However, it is still something that website designers make the mistake of doing.

Using low-quality and stock images is not creative. They will be seen on other websites and they make your site look outdated & messy. Do you really want to leave these kinds of impressions for users?

Mobile Unfriendliness

Yes, you’re seeing this again.

Why? Being mobile-friendly is one of the most important, if not the most important aspects of a successful website. With more than half of the world’s web traffic coming from smartphones, as a business, you cannot afford to build a website that is not mobile-friendly.

In order to determine how mobile-friendly your website is, Google’s Page Speed test and Gmetrix are two great websites that will analyse your website and give you the results that you are looking for.

Not Using a Form of Analytics

In order to determine how successful your website is, one will need to track the amount of traffic that comes in and out of the website as well as the behaviour of users on the website. Unfortunately, and something which is a fairly common occurrence, web designers have made the mistake of not setting up any form of analytics for websites that they have designed.

Tracking is imperative for measuring the success of your:

• Website.
• Web designer’s performance.
• Marketing efforts

As a result, it is something that you need to make sure is set up, and set up properly.

To help you, we suggest using Google Analytics to track the performance of your website. It’s easy to set up, and easy to navigate, and it compiles all the data you are looking for in the simplest of formats.

Choosing Elaborate Visuals Over User Experience

Let’s make this simple: What would you prefer? A simple, elegant site that loads quickly and is easy to navigate? Or a flashy, visually dominated website that has a slow load time and looks complicated?

That’s what we thought.

Having many colour schemes; extensive, high-quality imagery; animations; and fonts that have been designed far too elaborately will contribute negatively to the user experience of the site, including slowing down its load time.

When designing a website, keep the following in mind:

• Simple Fonts.
• One colour scheme throughout.
• Few, but high-quality images.
• Short, simple videos.

Now that you know what went wrong so often in the web design world in 2017, you should be heading into 2018 with web design experts who will avoid and combat the difficulties and issues that come with designing and maintaining a website.

What’s more? You don’t have to look any further. We have the perfect team of experts who will design, re-design and maintain your website to absolute perfection. Come try us.